A little about Path Interactive
Path Interactive is a full-service internet advertising firm that manages results oriented ad campaigns for national, regional & local business clients. With a focus on pay per click (PPC) and search engine marketing, Path Interactive’s clients include Billboard.com, Loehman’s, Zagat, and over 100 national and local brands.
Marin has provided a huge increase in efficiency for managing Facebook Ads. Creative Rotation has helped us maintain performance over time, and the automated bid optimization ensures we are as effective as possible with ad-spend.
Looking for a cross-channel advertising solution
Path Interactive operates extensive marketing programs for brands across paid search, SEO, display and social adverting. Each year their clients have chosen to drive an increasing amount of their budget towards social media advertising. For Path Interactive, however, managing cross-channel online advertising campaigns for national brands was becoming increasingly time-consuming. The agency needed a solution that would enable their team to work more effectively between the marketing channels and spend less time analyzing disparate data sets in Excel.
The agency’s challenges were most acute when trying to manage the performance of ads on Facebook. Path Interactive has multiple retail clients, each with goals of building a Facebook fan base to increase revenue and enable remarketing on the site. The Path Interactive team was spending a significant amount of time calculating and adjusting Facebook bids manually. Plus the agency was seeing considerable decreases in campaign performance over time due to user’s growing fatigue with Facebook Ads. Path Interactive needed a solution to alert them when these drops in click-through-rate occurred and to more efficiently edit ads to prevent performance decreases over time.
Path Interactive values the powerful Facebook solutions found in Marin
Path Interactive performed an extensive evaluation of online advertising management platforms, concluding that Marin Software provided the best solution to meet their unique search and social marketing requirements. Marin addresses Path Interactive’s workflow needs, providing an analysis and optimization solution for Facebook ads, fully integrated with a paid search management platform. Also, because it was one of the first Facebook API tools to market, Path Interactive was confident that Marin would address their growing Facebook needs with a full-featured solution. The integration of paid-search and social allows the agency to easily analyze cross-channel interactions for clients and build holistic online advertising reports from a single interface.
Marin’s audience templates and segmentation tools for Facebook made the ad creation process much more efficient for Path Interactive. And, the Creative Rotation feature for Facebook Ads instantly helped the agency address the ad-fatigue that was driving click-through-rates down.
Path Interactive decreases cost-per-like by 30%
Path Interactive has seen impressive time savings and improved performance using Marin to manage Facebook Ads. Marin Creative Rotation saves Path Interactive hours that that they previously spent changing images and creative to boost performance of ads when click-through rates began to drop. In addition, automating the creative refresh enabled the agency to rotate ads more often, improving average click-through rates up to 35% for one customer. Marin enabled Path Interactive to meet their client’s Facebook “fan” goals much more efficiently by optimizing spend according to ad-performance by audience segment. With one large retail client they were able to get 30% of paid visitors to “like” the brand’s page by promoting a give-away with Facebook Ads. In this example, Marin’s automated bid optimization and creative rotation decreased the cost-per-like by over 30%.
Arguably the biggest innovation the paid search industry has seen in the past decade is the advent of Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bidding solution. I remember when I first entered the industry as an Account Coordinator… Ah, the good (or bad?) old days. A majority of my time was spent manually updating CPC bids for every keyword in my client’s Google and Bing Ad accounts. I would analyze how each campaign was pacing toward my client’s KPI and calculate new bids multiple times a week.
Enter Google’s tROAS and tCPA smart bidding strategies. I remember my Google account reps encouraging my team to test these automated strategies and how skeptical we all were. The only automated bidding we had heard of in the past was through Marin! But as the years went by and Google’s automation won more and more bidding tests, Smart Bidding became the norm.
Now manual bidding is a thing of the past – manual CPC isn’t even an option anymore. And what paid search marketer isn’t relieved to be freed of the tedious tasks associated with manual bidding?
These publisher bidding strategies are great… but they’re an incomplete solution. What if you want budget pacing, not just ROAS or CPA, to be considered in bidding decisions? Can you ask Google’s algorithm to do that? Not without a complex custom script… and I certainly don’t know how to code.
Managing budget pacing still requires manual intervention – that is unless you use Marin! Read on to understand some of the ways Marin makes smart bidding even better.
Manage everything in one place
Jumping across publisher tools can be time-consuming and fragment your workflows and data. With Marin, all your different campaigns across Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more are unified in one UI.
Marin unifies publisher data from tools like Google and Microsoft ads with backend data from tracking solutions like Google Analytics. We even have our own tracking solution, Marin Attribution, which is a more straightforward alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
All that data comes together in our interactive, customizable reporting grids. From campaigns, all the way down to individual keywords, front-end metrics – like costs and clicks – are married to backend metrics – like conversions and revenue – and attributed to the correct source. You can even create your own custom columns with the calculations that matter most to you. That means no more spreadsheets.
Transitioning your reporting and analysis from an Excel grid to the Marin grid eliminates the need for any manual data wrangling, saving time and improving data accuracy. Check out how easy it is to analyze performance in Marin.
Marin makes it easier than ever to analyze cross-channel performance and clearly determine what is working well and what needs attention. If you decide to take any action based on that analysis, Marin makes that process easier than ever, too.
Edit smart bidding settings across publishers
After using Marin’s reporting grid to determine what’s working and what’s not, you can use our multi-edit functionality to make changes. Update your smart bidding settings like strategy, target, bid cap, and more in Marin and avoid wasting time hopping between unintuitive publisher UIs.
Maximize ROAS with Dynamic Allocation
If you find yourself grappling with questions of how much you should spend on each of your campaigns, let Marin solve them for you. Our budget allocation solution harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible across campaigns and channels.
It all starts with your goals. First, you’ll meet with your Marin team to discuss your KPI targets and spend goals. Next, you’ll group your campaigns into different spend groups. Some examples of typical spend groups are brand, non-brand, retargeting, and prospecting.
Marin’s AI will take it from there. It will analyze how each of your campaigns is currently pacing toward your KPIs and review impression share metrics to determine if there is more room for a campaign to spend in the SERP or if that campaign is already dominating. It’ll then allocate your budget across all the campaigns in the given bucket based on each campaign’s potential.
You can either auto-apply Marin’s budget recommendations, or review them in the Marin app and apply them manually as you see fit. Manage it all in Marin’s budget pacing dashboard, which showcases not only how your budget groups are pacing toward spend goals, but revenue and ROAS trends as well.
Get unbiased recommendations for improvement
The publishers all provide recommendations to improve performance. But if you look closely, these recommendations always seem to lead to you spending more money on ads — not necessarily getting you any closer to hitting your KPI targets. Marin’s recommendation engine is free from publisher bias and has complete context on how all of your campaigns are doing across your customer lifecycle. This makes it more accurate than Google or Bing’s recommendations. And just like Google’s recommendations, they can be applied with one click.
In the modern paid media landscape, maintaining independence from domineering publisher tools is more valuable than ever. If our blog hasn’t convinced you of that yet, Marin’s unbiased recommendations will.
Say goodbye to publisher walled gardens
If you’re only using publisher tools for paid search media buying, you're limiting your marketing program. Marin can help you save time and improve your ROAS or CPA in countless ways. The best part? Marin is completely customizable. Unlike the publisher tools' one-size-fits-all approach, we can adapt our software to your business’s specific needs. Share your struggles with a Marin rep today and learn what we can do to help!
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If you’re still unsure what Marin can do for you, see some of our favorite features in action.
